Yeah, that was ugly humor from my part. Forgot to add an emoticon, forgive me.\Siriusly though, with the experience you are getting, you will get there faster than you did with the pyro. If not, that means they are gonna be a lot better too. Either way is promising. In the meantime thanx for the update like W said, it is important but more important is to keep cool with your pace. Better do it the way you like it best and a bit slower, then rush it up and be unsatisfied. You are doin' art, you 're not on a paycheck.

You had me worried there for a second, but no harm done. I have two big problems at the moment. Getting my meshes from Rhino into 3DS MAX is an issue. Every time I have to do it faces get flipped at random and I have to go around and reverse them manually. It hasn't been too bad up till now but the new detailed canopy has over 1300 faces, some of them tiny and hard to find. Don't worry the version that I will be using in-game has closer to 200. The more detailed one is meant to generate a texture to use on the lesser one. That leads to my second problem;TEXTURING. That is the one element of modelling that I never learned at all in school and is completely new to me. I am not very good at it. I tend to think of the ones I have now almost as placeholders until I can learn to do better or somebody else decides that they want to have a go at them.

Well it's been almost two years since I last touched this project but now I'm back at it. To get back into the swing of things I'm starting by almost completely remodeling the interior. The cockpit that I built two years ago that you have seen on this forum was based on a screenshot of the 2d cockpit overlay from Descent 2. So far so good, but it was based on a screenshot at 1680x1050 (or a 16x10 ratio). This means that the image I used as my reference was stretched sideways and therefore all of the proportions of my model were thrown completely off.

For this new version I have started with a screenshot of the 2d cockpit in its original 4x3 ratio. The result already looks better even at this early stage. Now of course as widescreen was meant to do you can see more of the cockpit interior at the sides than before. I am also attempting to simplify the geometry, especially of the dashboard, to reduce polygons. Luckily I am able to reuse bits and pieces from the old one.

The other significant change is that I have learned that my old model was at an angle within the pyro that put the reticle nowhere near where shots from the lasers would fire. this new one has been rotated within the canopy and is being built at the proper alignment.

I guess you never stop finding things to fix and tweak. Anyway, here is a first look at the rough model so far.Cheers, Yoshimitsu

Thanks Karx. I have a question that maybe you can answer. Do you know, or can you find out the lens length and size of Descent's ingame camera? I have just learned that I'm modelling using a 35mm lens with a 50mm lens length. I sincerely hope that this is not too different from the game camera otherwise my proportions could be completely wrong! Now that I've realized that this might be a problem I don't really want to continue until I know that I won't need to redo it all again later.

Sorry, I don't have that information. All I can give you is the in-game FoV and approximate unit of measurement. FoV is 105 degrees, length unit is between 1 and 2 meters (i.e. a length value of 1.0 in the game is equivalent to something between 1 and 2 m, depending on what you assume the ship size would irl. Hint: Ship radius is about 4.5 units, so I would go for 1 length unit ~ 1 meters.

I remember looking at this forum 2 years ago getting so excited . Scary how time flies. Thanks for coming back to the project yoshi, you are the man along with everyone else who is involved with descent .

Thanks Science1d1. I know what you mean about time flying. Of course as soon as I started again I hit the busiest few weeks of my life and haven't had time to model, play Descent, or do anything computer related at all, but I think this week I will be able to jump back into Rhino and make some progress.